Bach Cantatas Volume 15 – Kuijken

There is no shortage of complete Bach cantata cycles — Gardiner on his own SDG label, the old Harnoncourt/Leonhardt collaboration now buried in a 60-disc Warner Teldec sarcophagus, Rilling on Hänssler, Suzuki’s BIS project finally approaching its conclusion after what feels like a generation. Into this crowded field, Sigiswald Kuijken’s Accent series has proceeded quietly, without the fanfare those others commanded, and it deserves considerably more attention than it gets.

Volume 15 completes the liturgical year — all the works here belong to the latter Sundays after Trinity, those gray November weeks when the church calendar winds down toward Advent without much ceremony to mark the time. Bach, characteristically, supplied the ceremony himself.

The most immediately striking thing about Kuijken’s approach is his use of solo voices throughout, one per part in the choral movements. Controversial, yes — it always is. But in the hands of Kuijken and Joshua Rifkin, who has championed the same practice, the results argue persuasively for themselves. There’s a transparency to the counterpoint, an exposure of inner voices, that larger choral forces simply cannot achieve. Whether Bach intended it this way remains contested territory, but the music breathes differently — and not badly.

Cantata No. 52 opens with a sinfonia drawn from an early version of Brandenburg Concerto No. 1. Bach raiding his own Brandenburg material makes perfect sense when you consider that the Margrave who received those concertos apparently couldn’t have cared less about them. La Petite Bande plays this borrowed sinfonia with such idiomatic snap and rhythmic spring that you find yourself wishing they’d record the complete set.

Then there’s Cantata No. 140 — Wachet auf, as everyone knows it, though it actually belongs not to Advent but to the 27th Sunday after Trinity. The Leipzig church fathers prohibited cantata performances at the main service during most of Advent, which is why Bach set this text for a Sunday reached only in years when Easter falls unusually early. The Lutheran lectionary extended to 27 Sundays after Trinity; the Roman and Anglican rites simply didn’t go there. It’s a small piece of liturgical history that reframes how you hear the work — less an anticipation of Christmas than a late-autumn meditation, the watchmen calling out across a darkening calendar.

I reviewed Volume 9, the Advent cantatas, back in December 2010 and then somehow lost track of this series entirely. That was my loss. The booklet included here — “CD Edition 2006–2012,” wrapping up the project — signals with gentle finality that this is the end. That’s all, folks, as they used to say. But what a quietly distinguished body of work to leave behind.